


Wolf Star

by Sholio



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Families of Choice, Gen, Parent-Child Relationship, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-24
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2018-12-19 09:12:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11894592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Peter goes to the stars with a secret. (Mildly AU. Peter is a werewolf. Uses the same werewolf "rules" as my White Collar werewolf 'verse.)





	Wolf Star

**Author's Note:**

> I finally found another canon where I can use the same werewolf rules as in my White Collar werewolf AU! (Which you can read [here](http://archiveofourown.org/series/54280) if you want to.) Basically this particular werewolf AU relies upon the werewolf characters having family or close friends near them for their entire lives, because that's what stops them from tipping over the edge into ravening werewolf monsters. The first story in the werewolf 'verse linked above explains the rules, as does this one.
> 
> This is for the "transformation" square on my trope bingo card.

It took Peter a long time, as a child, to understand that everybody didn't turn into a wolf on the night of the full moon. 

He always went through the change with his mother, sometimes with Grandma and Grandpa if they were spending it on his grandparents' farm. Those were the best times, because they could all go running through the fields and woods, chasing the scents of small forest creatures, or just playing with each other in the moonlight-dappled shadows.

When they weren't on the farm, his mom closed all the curtains in the little two-bedroom house they shared, and made a nest of blankets on the living-room floor, and she and Peter stayed inside all night. That wasn't as much fun as being outside; he was always restless, too aware of the smells of the night coming under the closed door. But he liked curling up with Mom in the blanket nest. Little wolves had bedtimes too.

As he got older, Mom taught him the rules. There were only two rules, but they were very important.

First: don't talk about it to anyone who isn't part of The Pack. (The Pack consisted of Peter and his mother, Grandma and Grandpa, and Aunt Mary and Uncle Robert, his mom's sister and her husband.)

Peter was only six when his grandfather sat him down and explained why this rule mattered. Years ago, he said, all the werewolves had been ... and here he hesitated briefly before he told Peter they'd been locked up in cages by humans, and now there weren't very many werewolves left in the world. If anyone found out about Peter's family, they would be taken away and locked up too.

The other rule was that he must always, always be with The Pack when the change happened to him. It was okay if the whole pack wasn't together, although it was better if they were. But if Peter was alone, he would go wild. A werewolf with their pack at the full moon was pretty much like a normal wolf, Mom explained. But if he was alone, he would lose control of himself and become a _bad_ wolf. He would want to hunt.

"But I do want to hunt," he said. At the most recent full moon, he'd brought down his first rabbit. He'd eaten a little of it raw, but when they were all human-shaped again, Grandma had proudly cooked up the rest for breakfast, and everyone had made a big deal over him. It had been _amazing._

"No, baby, not like that," Mom said. "You won't be _you_ anymore, not 'til you change back. You know all those fierce feelings you get when you change, the way you want to run after anything that moves, how you want to be outside? Those feelings?" He nodded. "Well, if you don't have your pack around you, those feelings take you over. You'll want to chase and hunt and bite. You lose yourself in what we call moon madness. You might really hurt somebody."

It wasn't too long after that when Mom got sick, and they all started living at the farm all the time. But the hunting nights weren't so nice anymore, because a lot of the time Mom was too sick to hunt, so Grandma stayed with her while Peter went out with Grandpa, and it wasn't really the same.

And then she died.

And then he was in space, and there was no Pack anywhere.

 

***

 

For Peter's first week or two on the _Eclector,_ he was too busy simply trying to survive and cope with the dislocation and terror of what had happened to him to even remember about the full moon.

When he did remember, he panicked. Mom and then Grandpa had always kept track of the days for him. And of course, if he ever needed to know, he could just look at the moon, or check the calendar in the kitchen that showed all the moon phases.

But out here in space, there was no moon. There were no days. He didn't know how long it had been. He didn't even know if he would change at all, without the moon. Or would something worse happen? He'd always gotten the impression that it was very bad for werewolves not to change. He definitely knew that when the feeling came over him, it was impossible to hold it back. What if he _died?_

But if it did work like it was supposed to, he'd be in almost as much trouble, because he didn't have the pack to keep him sane.

He was older now than he had been when Mom had first told him the rules, and through the years, he'd overheard various conversations between the grownups when they didn't think he was listening -- enough to give him occasional nightmares. A werewolf without its pack was where the legend of the werewolf as a ravening monster came from. If he changed here, on this ship, with nowhere to go ...

He might kill someone.

He probably _would_ kill someone. Maybe a lot of someones.

Maybe they'd be scared of him then. He was terrified of _them_ ; the idea of not having to be scared anymore had a sneaky appeal.

But then he thought about sinking his wolf teeth into human flesh (well, alien flesh) and shivered and felt sick. He didn't want to kill anyone, even a mean old space pirate.

But ...

But he wasn't supposed to tell anyone.

By now he'd figured out, also courtesy of overheard conversations combined with a child's active and lurid imagination, that when his grandfather had told him humans had "locked up" the other werewolves, it had been a kind version of the truth, tailored to a little kid. There weren't very many werewolves left anymore because humans had killed most of them. And if humans had done that, then there was no telling what alien pirates would do. They would probably just kill him right off. That pirate captain would put that arrow right through him. If they didn't, they might put him in a cage and sell him to a zoo or something.

But if he didn't tell them, he'd probably kill _them_. Or, when he changed and started attacking them, they'd kill him in self-defense.

It was a terrible decision for an eight-year-old to have to make, but in the end, when he felt the first itchy beginnings of the change crawling through him and knew that it could happen without the moon after all, he decided in utter panic that he _had_ to tell the pirate captain the truth. It was his only, slim chance to maybe survive. If he didn't, they were definitely gonna kill him for sure when he changed.

He had gotten good, by this time, at crawling around in the ship's ventilation system, which was much too small for the grown pirates to get into. He was desperate and frightened enough that it was with only the slightest trace of fear that he kicked out the ventilation grate over a chair in Yondu's quarters and dropped out after it. Bloodthirst was crawling up his throat. He didn't have much time. He wished now that he hadn't waited until he'd have to choke out the explanation past his body's struggles to change.

There was a soft intake of breath and a quick flurry of motion from the figure buried under furs on the bed. Peter could see him even in the dimness; the change wasn't far off now. A sharp whistle; Peter flinched as the arrow came to rest almost touching his nose.

"What the hell," Yondu said wearily. He was sitting up, wearing a stained tunic, his fin and eyes a dim red glow in the dark. "It's the kid, ain't it? Hell you doin', breakin' in here, boy?"

"I -- I -- you have to lock me up!" Peter burst out, digging his fingernails into his palms in an attempt to distract himself with the sharp bursts of pain.

"Crew givin' you a hard time, boy?" Lazily, Yondu whistled the arrow back to his side.

"No!" Peter almost wailed. "No, I'm gonna kill someone, I -- ow --"

He doubled over in pain. He'd been right, fighting off the change _hurt._ But he _had_ to.

Yondu swung his legs out of bed, clad in thin sleeping breeches. "You sick, boy?"

"No," Peter gasped, "no, but you gotta put me in a ... I don't care what, anything to lock me up. I'll kill you, I will."

"You," Yondu said. "You'll kill _me."_

But just then Peter looked up, with the wolf shining out of his eyes, and the mocking laughter died in Yondu's throat. He stared at Peter, and Peter stared back, somewhere between wolf and human, aware of the predator under his skin as he'd never been before.

"Whaddya need, boy?" Yondu asked quietly, and it was serious in a way he'd never talked to Peter before.

"Something I can't get out of," Peter gasped. "Something I -- I -- _no_ \--"

He doubled over again. He'd never fought the change before. Not like this. And there was a part of him that wanted to let go, just give up, just kill every last one of the kidnapping, bullying jerks -- Yondu most of all -- but --

But Mom wouldn't like it.

So he wouldn't.

For her.

He was vaguely aware of a hand closing over his arm, impossibly strong, cool against his overheated skin. Yondu hauled him across the room. Peter staggered and leaned against the wall, gasping, as Yondu carelessly shoved some crates aside and pressed his thumb to a security strip. Some kind of door, perhaps the door of a private vault, sprang open, and Yondu slid his hand across it again, making what had been a solid-looking wall transparent.

"This do for you? And stars help me, boy, if this is a trick --"

All Peter could do was cry out in pain, curling on himself, his hands curling into claws.

Yondu took hold of him and threw him into the vault and closed the door.

Peter hit the floor with a bruising impact and thrashed his way clumsily to his hands and knees. He crouched with his head bowed, and finally he couldn't hold it back any more. The wolf roared to the surface, and then there was no more Peter Quill -- not like back home, where there was still some Peter in him. Now it was only wolf, with no more Peter at all. 

And now he understood what the moon madness really was.

He thew himself at the transparent front of the vault, just a half-grown, juvenile wolf, but the only thing in his tiny wolf brain was a vicious drumbeat of _hunt, hurt, kill._ Some part of his wolf-self recognized the awful grief of his mother's death, wrapped it up with the bone-deep awareness that these people had _hurt him,_ and turned it into a diamond-pointed arrow of killing fury, pointed at Yondu's neck.

Except he couldn't get to him. He flung himself at the cage, over and over, shrieking and howling and snarling in a voice that was sometimes half-human, sometimes all wolf, and made of pure fury.

Yondu had recoiled at Peter's first assault, flinging himself backward and nearly stumbling over a chair, whistling the arrow up to his shoulder. But then he came back, cautiously, until he was standing only a bare arm's length in front of the cage while Peter shrieked and slavered at him. Had Peter been able to recognize expressions right now, he would've seen something on the pirate's features that he'd never yet seen as a human: a very open look of curiosity and pity.

"What the hell they do to you, kid?" Yondu asked softly.

There was a pounding on the door of his quarters. "Cap'n?" Horuz's voice called. "Hell's goin' on in there? Sounds like you torturin' somebody to death."

Yondu turned on his heel and strode to the door. Peter bounced off the forcefield again and fell to the floor of the cage, bruised and panting, tongue lolling out of his jaws.

His wolf brain wasn't quite able to interpret what he saw, which was Yondu yanking open the door of his quarters just enough to snap, "You botherin' me in my business, Horuz? We need to talk about this?"

Horuz recoiled. "Uh, no, Cap'n."

New scent. Fresh blood. Peter snarled, and it rose to an eerie, shivering howl.

"What in the hell is _that?"_ Horuz demanded, trying to look around him into the dark depths of his quarters, near-black to most humanoids, for all that it was nearly light to Peter's wolf eyes.

"That's my business, not yours. Git, an' don't bother me 'til I come out, unless the ship's on fire."

"Uh ... yeah ..." Horuz made a last attempt to stare into the dark, then left. Yondu closed the door and locked it.

"Just you an' me, boy," he murmured, coming back to the cage.

Peter made an earnest attempt to rip his way through the vault door, nearly dislocating his front shoulders in the process.

"Uh-huh." Yondu threw himself down on the pile of furs on the bed and rolled over. "Wake me up if you got anything interesting to say."

He couldn't possibly sleep through a werewolf shrieking and snarling at him all night. Even Peter's limited wolf brain was baffled by this.

But he did. Apparently a blood-mad werewolf trying to break out of a cage and kill him, some fifteen feet from the bed, was nothing on the Kree slave pens.

 

***

 

In the morning, Peter woke dazed, shivering, and bruised, with a fur thrown over his bare child's body, the door of the vault half open and Yondu crouching outside, looking at him.

"You wanna eat first, kid, or talk?"

"Eat," Peter mumbled. His throat felt like it had been scraped out with sandpaper.

He was ravenous and desperately thirsty. His hands were covered with bruises, their nails torn and broken. His whole body was bruised. He scrambled out of the cage, not wanting to be in there a second longer, and then hunched miserably with the fur wrapped around him, eating with his hands while Yondu sat a few feet off and stared curiously at him.

Apparently he hadn't managed to kill Yondu last night. But he remembered wanting to, and it made him shiver violently, and the food he'd eaten bucked in his belly.

"How often this happen to you, boy?" Yondu asked.

"Once a month," Peter mumbled.

"Terran month?"

Peter nodded.

"Huh. All Terrans do this?"

Peter shook his head. "Just my family." As far as he knew.

"Science experiments? Magic?"

Peter shrugged and shoveled glop into his mouth. Food on the _Eclector_ was pretty bad, but it was hot and full of protein and calories, which was all he really cared about right now.

Yondu gazed at him for a little while, then said quietly, "Hard luck, kid."

"It wasn't that bad on Earth," Peter said bitterly, between bites. "It's only that bad 'cause _you_ brought me out here."

"Space what does it?"

Peter shook his head. "I need Pack."

"What's Pack?"

Peter shook his head again. How did you explain it? "Family," he spit out, and shoved a crumpled up piece of something resembling flatbread into his mouth. "People you like," he said around it. "People that like you. Don't you have pack animals in space, you stupid pirate?"

Yondu's hairless brows went up at the insult, but the arrow stayed in its quiver. "Like gorskinks or loskins? Or them Xandarian winged things what flocks together?"

"I don't know what those are," Peter muttered sullenly.

"So what is it that does it for you? Your momma and daddy?" Yondu asked, looking intrigued for reasons Peter would not understand until a very long time later.

"My mom," Peter mumbled, and Yondu looked even more intrigued.

"Yeah? You and your mom go be critters together?"

"Yes," Peter said between his teeth, "and we'd hunt together in the woods and it was _good_ , and I ... I won't ever do it again, so ... never mind." He bowed his head over his food.

"Just on Earth, huh? World don't hold still for you, boy."

Peter made a noise that wasn't too different from some of the growls he'd made the night before, spitting fury, and Yondu gave a quick, sharp-toothed grin that said he was thinking about this.

 

***

 

And that was how it went for the next year or so.

29 days out of every 30 (or so), life on the ship went on as normal. Yondu taught Peter to steal, to shoot a gun, and (with generous applications of brutal bodily force) to fight. Peter went to bed miserable and sometimes hungry and often bruised, and slowly, ever so slowly, he started to learn how life worked here.

And once a month, he came to Yondu's quarters -- furious, miserable, humiliated -- and slunk into the cage, and Yondu shut him in.

Then Yondu sat outside the cage and did whatever he was going to do (cleaned his arrow, or worked on little bits of tech, or glanced back and forth between pages of text on a screen and on a little handheld book -- it took Peter a very long time to realize that Yondu, when he first met him, read at roughly the galactic equivalent of first or second grade, and was teaching himself to do it better, something he never, _ever_ did where anyone else could see). And Peter snarled and raged behind the forcefield, but gradually, gradually, he began to calm down, if only because spending the entire night in a bloodthirsty fury was too exhausting to keep up, month after month.

About a year after Peter came onto the ship, he had finally settled down enough to spend most of the night resting with his head on his paws in front of the door -- and, on the second of these months, he raised his head suddenly in the middle of the night, at the clunk of the door opening.

Yondu, with the arrow powered up and humming at his side, and a blaster in his hands, took a slow, careful step back. "You layin' there 'cause you just waitin' on your chance to eat me? Now I guess we find out, or else keep you in there for the rest of your life."

Peter stood up. Yondu, on the other side of the bars, watched him calmly, nothing about him betraying fear.

Peter came out of the cage slowly, a lanky juvenile wolf with ginger-colored fur. He gave Yondu a wide berth and, with head and tail low, slunk around Yondu's quarters, sniffing at things. To his wolf brain, there was a wealth of rich scents here.

He explored for hours. Years ago, he used to run free in the forest on full moon nights. Now, for the last year, his wolf-world had been bounded by the walls of the vault; being given even this limited kind of freedom filled him with wonder. He sniffed everything, poked his head up into anything that would fit a wolf head, opened drawers with his paws and stuck his head inside.

After awhile, Yondu sat down on the edge of the bed and watched him, just watched him the whole time, fascinated.

Peter eventually, very much later, came back around to the bed, put a paw up onto it, and then jumped up on it -- something that human Peter wouldn't have dared to do. 

Yondu drew back slightly. "Watch yourself, boy," he said, warning in his tone.

Peter hesitated, then lay down obediently, making himself lower than the person that some part of him instinctively recognized as his pack leader.

Yondu looked down at him.

"You gonna stay there, huh? No ripping my throat out or nothin'?"

Peter curled his furry body on the bed and rested his tail over his nose.

"Cheeky brat," Yondu muttered.

 

***

 

The next month, Yondu opened the cage immediately and Peter trotted out as if it was his due. He did a brief circuit of Yondu's quarters, sniffing things, and then realized that Yondu was at the door, so he breezed over with his tail held high.

Yondu looked down at him. "Yeah, don't get ahead of yourself. There's rules. You listening?" He whistled up the arrow, which, at a single sharp whistle, spun around and touched its hot tip to Peter's ear.

Peter lowered his head and tail. A growl rumbled in his throat.

Yondu dropped to one knee and looked him straight in the eyes from no more than a foot away, nose to nose with the snarling wolf's muzzle, the arrow pressed against Peter's fur, Yondu's fearless and angry red eyes boring into his. "Don't you never, ever growl at me again, boy. You got that?"

Peter growled again, just the tiniest burble, and then he lay down, slowly and carefully. Head and tail went down onto the floor.

Yondu let out a slow, huffing breath and straightened up. He stood for a moment, looking down at Peter. Then he said, "Til I tell you, you stay by me when we're outside the Cap'n's quarters, you got that? You go runnin' off, an' my whistle's the last noise you gonna hear, 'cause we havin' fox stew for dinner."

Peter gave a small huff of breath and stared at the wall.

"That better be a yes, 'cause that's the only warning you gonna get." He opened the door. "C'mon."

Peter sprang to his feet, tail raising like a flag, and trotted out the door, precisely at Yondu's side and one step behind.

 

***

 

They walked all over the ship that night. A lot of crew members did a startled double take at the sight of Yondu prowling around the ship with a very large predator beside him, but Yondu returned any curious glances with a hard look, and no one had the temerity to ask questions. 

The arrow trailed along in their wake, a few feet behind them.

They wandered the whole ship, Peter prowling in fascination, sniffing everything, but snapping back to Yondu's side at the hint of a whistle. As the night duty shift wound down towards the day, all-hands-on-deck shift, Yondu took Peter back to the captain's quarters, and Peter jumped back up on the fur covering the bed. Just in time too: he curled up and shifted back to a tired-out kid a few minutes later.

Peter woke up that morning with Yondu's coat flung over him and Yondu sitting with his back against a pile of pillows at the head of the bed, reading (or puzzling his way through words on the screen, at least), one leg tucked up and the other spread out, paying no mind to Peter at all.

 

***

 

Throughout Peter's life on the _Eclector,_ the ship was his forest, a forest made of steel decking, ventilation shafts, and moving mechanical parts. After the first few months of his newly expanded horizons, he didn't stay with Yondu on his wolf nights. Now he prowled the ship from top to bottom as a wolf, making sure all was as it should be, a sort of lupine inspection on the captain's behalf. New Ravagers were clearly disconcerted by it, but the veterans on the crew were used to him. Usually he'd end up on the flight deck, where Yondu always seemed to make sure he was taking the duty shift on Peter's wolf nights. Peter would lie down and look out at the stars, his wolf ears pricked forward.

And somehow, as the years went by and they both got used to it, Yondu often ended up sitting with Peter on the floor, in a casual and matter-of-fact way that suggested _of course_ that was where he'd rather sit, and the fact that there was a wolf already there didn't make much difference.

Sometimes he'd rest a hand on Peter's ginger fur, his strong fingers curling deep into the thick wolf pelt.

Peter got the impression that Yondu liked him better when he was a wolf, and he wasn't sure how to feel about that. The thought didn't occur to him until a very long time later that maybe it wasn't that Yondu preferred him as a wolf, it was just that Yondu understood him better when he was a wolf. His wolf self was simpler than his human self, with wolfish thoughts and wolfish needs.

Going on long trips on the Milano was a risk, especially as his long trips got longer, until sometimes he didn't come back at all. He had a special room built in the back of the ship, with an extra-reinforced door. For carrying special cargo, he'd tell people, and leave it to their imaginations what was "special" about it. And in all honesty, it _was_ useful for transporting certain kinds of stuff.

But mostly, when he wasn't near the _Eclector_ and felt the change coming on, he'd go in there and lock himself in, and then he'd go through the much more savage, painful change alone. It wasn't really _that_ bad. He woke up human with his hands sore from clawing at the walls, but it was really just like any inconvenient and slightly painful medical condition. There were far worse things he could've had to deal with.

And if he missed ... missed Yondu, missed those long nights on the _Eclector,_ then it was just part of growing up, part of going away from home.

 

***

 

He didn't really think through the implications of having other people living on the Milano with him, until he started to feel the change coming on, tingling in the back of his throat and across his scalp, and thought, _Fuck._

Gamora looked up in surprise when he tossed the handful of cards from the game they'd been playing onto the table between them and stood up.

"Peter?"

"Okay, so, there's something about me I haven't mentioned yet." He gripped the back of the chair. He still had control, but not for long -- smells were too sharp, lights were too bright, and he was all too aware of Gamora's pulse beating beneath her green skin. Rocket had turned around from taking apart some piece of tech on the floor to stare at him. "And I'll tell you all about it ... tomorrow. Right now, I need some alone time."

"If any of us have offended you, I apologize on behalf of --" Gamora began.

"It's not you, definitely not you, it's me." He was all but babbling now. "Just ... don't bother me, okay? I'll come find _you._ And I'll explain then."

The nice thing about being out here in the galaxy rather than on Earth, he thought as he stumbled toward his reinforced saferoom, was that nobody really seemed to think a guy turning into a killer wolf once a month was _that_ weird. Living among the Ravagers for all those years had mostly done away with his childhood fear of government goons locking him up or someone trying to put him in a zoo.

But he still really hated telling people about it, especially the "I could go out of control and kill you" part, and he wasn't looking forward to the conversation he was going to have with his new friends in twelve hours or so. He _really_ didn't want to have that conversation while his brain was half wolf and he was struggling to keep control over his instincts.

With new people on the Milano, his saferoom had picked up some clutter. Peter unceremoniously kicked several mostly-empty crates, a bucket, and a box of loose electronic odds and ends out into the hall.

"Hey, that's my shit! Don't touch my shit."

Rocket. Of _course_ Rocket had followed him, if anyone on the ship was going to. "Scram," Peter snarled at him -- really snarled. He saw Rocket recoil, staring in shock, right before he slammed the door and cycled the locking mechanism. 

It was, technically, possible to override it, he thought as he leaned on the door, still fighting the change while he tried to think through all the safety precautions that he _should_ have taken weeks ago, when he first welcomed this bunch onboard. But you'd need codes, and you'd need to really be motivated and skilled with electronics to get around them ... damn it, he should have told them _why_ they couldn't follow him, not just told them not to -- of course Rocket had taken that as an invitation --

But Rocket also had his gun on him at all times, and Peter was reasonably confident he wouldn't shoot to kill. The worst thing that would happen was very likely that, if Rocket _did_ get the door open and Peter tried to attack him, was that Rocket would stun him and he'd wake up as a naked human with a headache. Wouldn't be the first time.

He still fought to hold back the change much longer than he usually did, until it _hurt_ and he tasted blood on his lips. He just didn't want to hurt anyone. He was so tired of being scared he was going to hurt someone.

And then the wolf overwhelmed him and came roaring out of the deep part of his brain where it lived, and he went down to all fours and didn't care anymore.

It was some time later -- as a wolf, he had little awareness of the passage of time -- when the door hissed open. Peter, who had been pacing, whipped around and instinctively lunged at the open doorway, but a swift shadow darted through and the door hissed shut before he could reach it.

He was no longer the only person in the saferoom.

And he'd never seen the other person before in his life. Peter didn't even recognize his species.

The newcomer was wearing ill-fitting coveralls and holding a very large gun pointed at Peter. He was a small, slight humanoid with a shock of spiky dark hair and light grayish skin. There were blue and purple stripes curving gently away from his eyes across his cheeks toward his (vaguely pointed) ears, and more of the soft striping was visible on the backs of his hands. Some of it was slightly marred by scars, distorting the pattern.

Peter drew his lips back from his teeth and a snarl rumbled out of his chest. At the same time, something nagged at the back of his wolf-brain. The stranger's scent --

"Guess I was wrong," the stranger said, "but I really did think the only thing out there like me, was me."

The voice was a hundred percent pure Rocket, and the snarl died in Peter's throat. His ears pricked forward in utter bafflement.

"'Cept we're opposites, ain't we?" not-Rocket went on. "You're a humie most of the time, and every once in a while, you turn into this ... raccoon thing."

Wolf, Peter might have said, if he'd had vocal cords and a human-shaped mouth to say it with. But the words simply washed over him. His ability to understand spoken language as a wolf was somewhat limited; he could get most of it if he concentrated, but right now he was too busy being baffled by this creature that _sounded_ like Rocket, and kinda-sorta smelled a little like Rocket, but didn't look anything like Rocket.

"You can't control your turning, can ya?" Rocket went on, rotating slowly in place to keep the gun trained on Peter as Peter prowled around him, sniffing him from all angles. "Yeah, I had that problem too. Me, I got where I can force it, when I need to. Don't do it much at all anymore. You even _think_ about biting me, Quill," he added as Peter crept cautiously closer, "an' I'll mess you up so bad you'll be picking up teeth for a week."

Peter was too confused to even notice that he had no desire whatsoever to bite him. Instead he paced around Rocket until Rocket got bored and sat down on the floor with his gun across his knees, and then, after some more pacing, Peter came over and lay next to him.

He woke up a while later, naked and human and shivering a little, though someone had thrown his jacket over him. Rocket, back to his usual furry shape, was stretched out on the floor beside him, tinkering with the calibrations on his gun.

They never spoke of it. And Peter didn't see Rocket's other shape again -- not for a long time. Sometimes he thought he'd imagined it.

But one thing that did become clear to him was that his inner wolf instinctively and unquestioningly accepted these people as Pack, in the same way it had, eventually, accepted Yondu and the Ravagers.

They were family. He was safe with them.

After that first time, he didn't need to lock himself up once a month anymore.

 

***

 

The first time Peter changed after Yondu died was the first time in months that he didn't want to do it around the others.

It wasn't that he thought he'd lose control and hurt them, not even Mantis, who he already knew he'd instinctively accepted as family. It was just that, as a wolf, his emotions were simpler and closer to the surface. He had been fighting so hard to stay on top of the dark tide of grief threatening to drag him under. He didn't know what was going to happen when he changed; he only knew that he didn't want anyone else to see him like that.

So he went down quietly into the depths of the Quadrant. He missed his saferoom on the Milano, but there were several storage compartments down here with heavy-duty doors. It was the work of a few minutes to reset the lock on one of those doors. He set it to stay locked for twelve hours, which should get him through the change; it was rarely longer than that. He could already feeling it coming on, an itchy feeling in the back of his teeth, a tightening in his throat. And -- yes, there was the grief, the misery, rising in him, making him want to howl or scream, to bite metal until his jaws bled to distract himself from it.

He didn't want to feel everything the change was going to make him feel. Now that it was too late -- the door was sealed, he was locked in -- he wondered if he might have been able to get Kraglin to help him find something from the ship's stores to knock him out. He could have gone through the change in a drugged haze; it would've given him a hangover, but it would have been better than this ...

But his skin was already prickling, his bones aching as the change crept through him. He fell forward onto hands becoming paws. No one seemed to have noticed his absence, judging from the lack of pounding on the door. With all the upheaval lately, they weren't keeping careful track of the days; Peter himself hadn't thought of it until he had started to feel the change coming on.

Hopefully they wouldn't notice for the next twelve hours.

Peter moaned softly, changing to a whine in the middle as his throat reshaped itself. As his body rearranged, the world rearranged too, becoming simpler -- and right now, warped around the great, gaping hole where the core of his pack (leader, father, _center_ ) used to be.

It _hurt._ It hurt and there was nothing he could do about it. Peter paced frantically, snapping at the walls, tail tucked between his legs and shoulders hunched. He wanted to run. He wanted to hunt. He wanted to crawl into a hole and hide. He whined desperately. This wasn't the loss of control that he'd experienced in those early changes after coming on board the _Eclector_ ; his instincts knew that his pack was right upstairs. But in some ways it was similar. Just as he'd spent the first couple of years after his mother's death drowning in his grief for her, now he was sinking in a dark whirlpool of grief for Yondu.

"You poor kid," a rough voice said gently. "Settle down. It'll be okay."

Peter froze in mid-whine. His ears pricked forward. He turned his head.

Yondu was sitting on the floor, just like he used to on those long-ago nights on the flight deck, one arm over his knees.

Peter's wolf brain was confused. Yondu didn't have a smell. So he wasn't there. But he _was._ Peter's hackles rose.

Yondu frowned and leaned forward. "Wait a minute. Can you see me?"

Peter stalked forward to sniff cautiously at him. Still no smell. Yondu raised a hand and Peter pushed his nose into it -- through it.

Not here.

But here.

"Hell," Yondu said, grinning slowly. "None o' you can see me, except sometimes that Mantis gal knows I'm around, I think. Damn, boy. Just when I think you can't surprise me anymore."

Peter gave a stifled whine of pure frustration.

"I dunno," Yondu said, as if he'd understood the question that Peter, in wolf shape, couldn't ask. "I guess I could go on if I wanted to, probably. I can feel it sometimes, tuggin' at me. But hell, I ain't sure what I'd be movin' on _to_ \-- ain't lived a good life, you know. Here's as good a place as any for now." He held out his hand, palm up. "C'mere."

Peter, wolf-Peter and the lingering human part of him, needed no more invitation than that. The worst part was that he couldn't _talk,_ couldn't say any of the things crowding his throat -- and, as the change settled in and the human part of him was fully buried under the wolf part, he couldn't even remember what he had wanted to say anyway, or why it had been important.

But they'd always understood each other better without words anyway.

Peter lay down beside Yondu on the floor, just like he used to on those long nights on the flight deck. He curled his head around to rest it along Yondu's leg. And even though he couldn't feel it, he knew somehow that Yondu had a hand on his fur.

And slowly his tense wolf body began to relax, the shivering and rather unwolfy misery draining out of him. There was nothing to be afraid of. Yondu was here with him, wasn't he? And his simpler wolf mind knew that with Yondu beside him, things were going to be okay.


End file.
